


Piebald

by StellaDraco



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Biblical References, Caesar's Legion, Children, Dark, Debt, Depression, Enclave, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fatherhood, Hatred, Historical References, Life Debt, Literary References & Allusions, Love, Loyalty, Medical Conditions, Multi, Mythology References, Oaths & Vows, Pregnancy, Protection, Repaying Debt, Rescue, Slavery, Unrequited Love, piebaldism, psyker, pyrokinetic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-03-05 09:50:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3115598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellaDraco/pseuds/StellaDraco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In January of 2281, before the Courier wakes up in Goodsprings, a man named Leon arrives in the Mojave and his smallest actions shape the future of the wasteland.  <br/>This fic is intended to become mainly, if not exclusively Arcade Gannon/Vulpes Inculta, the addition of OCs is mainly to get them to that point, as I wanted to do some different way of getting the two involved with each other.<br/>((NOTE: Some Other World is my primary project until I finish it, this may be updated occasionally, but it will not be updated often until that is finished.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thunderstruck

I fell against the hard ground, my back and elbows striking rocks painfully. My head pounded and the disorientation only got worse as another soldier hit me with the butt of his service rifle, leaving a bloody streak below my eye. I could smell the smoldering tents but no longer hear them and I knew that last blow had done something to my ears. The soldiers had already looted the camp. I knew they’d been given orders to hold their positions and tactically their attack had been unsound, but I suppose these soldiers felt too wronged by the slaughter of Nipton to watch our camp idly. Or else they saw our encroachment and inevitable victory as a personal affront. Such a rash attack based on emotions and against orders would end badly for them, one way or another. They had lost two thirds of their party in the raid, but that seemed a small consolation now. I counted the faces above me. Ten men remaining of the thirty and all ten leered down at me now. By this I knew that my remaining soldiers had already been killed. They had slain them out of practicality. They could have already shot me if they had seen fit, which would have suggested that they sought to capture me if these had been men acting on orders. But these were drunk privates and lieutenants, not officers. They had broken orders by coming here at all and now I suspected much less official plans for myself. This was not the sort of “battle” that would be printed in NCR newspapers. This was the sort of ambush that would get swept under the rug while they publicized some lie that I had been killed by some other means.   
Inevitably, breaking their position and sacrificing twenty soldiers in this vengeance-driven strike would weaken the NCR position and only hasten a Legion victory, I told myself, but such knowledge failed to calm my mind. I had faced death less often than one might expect. Truthfully, many believed that I faced death more often than I truly did. The thing is, situations which threaten death seem far less dangerous when one has the sense and knowledge to be certain that death will not come. I had faced crucifixion as a teenager, but my knowledge of Caesar had negated my fear by letting me know that he would promote me for my cunning rather than execute me for disobedience to an idiot. Likewise, the times when my men and I had seemed outnumbered, I had always known that I could outrun them, and by that virtue I would use their weakness to distract our enemies and escape at the cost of their lives. I rarely faced danger without careful planning, in fact the last time that I had... The last time had been the night I had been accepted into the Legion following the slaughter of my tribe. A situation very similar, I noted, to my current predicament.   
My vision swam and I found that I had trouble holding my neck steady in my struggle to maintain some semblance of composure in the face of death. I would never allow these profligates to see me as weak. I would not scream or cry like the women we captured as slaves. I would not widen my eyes in terror like a child. I would not give them the satisfaction of hearing me curse their legacy, as captured rangers often cursed ours. I would not pass out, whatever my aching brain wanted to do. I stared resolutely up at the lieutenant in charge of the group, a fairly large young man with close-cut brown hair and dark eyes, trying to ignore the blood and tears blurring my vision and willing my eyes to stop watering from pain.   
I guess, somehow, my expression had managed to stay blank, because he snarled and spoke. I read his lips instinctively, a skill learned from years of observation. “We’ll break that mask of yours soon enough, little man.”  
Another kick. Not sure who from. It connected with the side of my skull and the Lieutenant followed it up by stepping solidly onto my chest, pinning me to the ground and forcing the air from my lungs. I knew I had no possible chance of drawing breath until he repositioned and planned a strike to escape his boot, but then the other soldiers moved in to hold me still. I refused to let my hatred show, so I only stared, memorizing every detail of the Lieutenant’s ugly face and willing it to burn. I tried to picture his execution. My body fought the pressure on my chest, muscles straining to inhale. I swore he would break ribs if he put any more weight on that leg. He eased forward, adding more and more pressure until the straining bones finally began to fracture. I bit my tongue to avoid crying out and counted the cracks. Six. Six agonizing snaps that reverberated through my torso as my oxygen-starved thoughts began to lose coherence. I begged him to miscalculate, to force the pressure and stop my heart. I begged the Legion to capture and crucify them when the Mojave was finally ours and I was long dead. I begged fate for a miracle.   
Impossibly, fate heard my silent plea.   
My blood-filled ears heard nothing, but a series of pale blue streaks blinded my straining and streaming eyes. Burned flesh and fabric joined the reek of the smoke from the tents. The weight on my chest shifted and nearly vanished as the leg collapsed. Hot fluid soaked my side beneath the knee of the lieutenant’s severed leg.   
The dazzle of the lights faded and the world around me eased back into view, shades and colors slowly separating to make the image clear. In a split second burst of light, the ten soldiers lay dead, each scorched by dozens of wounds. In terms of destruction, I had far more experience than most, and yet the sheer efficiency and speed of this attack left my dazed mind struggling to believe that the gods had not simply decided to smite these men. Nothing I had ever seen reached such a level of destruction, even grenades didn’t kill so quickly or in such numbers. And this was more precise by far. Belatedly, I realized that it had to be some type of laser, but a laser far more lethal than any I had ever seen before.   
The severed leg left just enough pressure on my broken ribs to keep my painfully renewed breathing shallow enough to be pointless. I still felt my thoughts struggling to form and knew that I couldn’t stay conscious much longer at this rate. I would pass out. Nearly dead as I already knew I was, if I lost consciousness I would never awaken. But nothing that I could do would change that.   
I felt blood in my throat but couldn’t summon the energy to cough. My sight began to fade again and I felt certain that it would never return. Amid the darkening flames, a figure stepped forward, towering over me. For an instant my mind placed the man as Lanius, a truly absurd conclusion, but then the image managed some focus. The man above me wore armor of storm clouds and lightning. His blurred and scarred face bore two pale eyes, one gold and one almost lavender. An uneven mane of crimson hair fluttered in the wind of the flames. As suffocation drew me to the void I vaguely took note of the odd white pattern on his forehead and in his hair. A series of three bars rising from a crossbar with a line descending towards his nose. A trident.


	2. Indebted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll keep switching back and forth between this and Some Other World for a while; I've gotten to miss the Fallout setting. Besides, Piebald will probably be a bit more dark and serious than Some Other World, although, who knows, my stuff seems to tend towards irreverent comedy more than I expect. XD

Leon did not recognize the man before him in the reddish glow of the burning camp or even the dim and pale cast of his power armor once he dragged the unconscious legionary to a sheltered hollow north of the flames.  Even if he had, he may not have cared.  At the moment, Leon had one concern alone, and that was his son.  With the NCR soldiers taken care of, he rested his modified Gatling laser against a nearby rock and called the boy over.  

Shaken by the past few months, Elipidos had quickly grown used to his father’s new demeanor.  He had spent nine happy years since his birth under the care of two kind and gentle parents who had made the post-apocalyptic world seem like a happy place and for all those years he had only seen one of them frown.  His father’s frowns had been rare at the time, only surfacing when particularly bad things happened, although Elipidos had never really understood what those things were.  Now Leon only spoke in orders, beckoning his son or telling him to wait and stay silent.  Now that frown never went away.  He’d given the boy a set of knives and a laser pistol and taught him how to use them although less than a year ago he’d sworn that Elipidos would never need to fight.  

The child wanted to go home.  Leon had told him that they had no home to go back to now.  He said they were going somewhere that would be safe, although it might not start out that way.  Elipidos had grown up knowing very little fear, surely much less than most children in this day and age, but now he feared everything.  Most of all he feared the new cruelty and cold of his father’s pale eyes.  

The only survivor of the rest of their family, a large animal Elipidos knew as a dog, followed right beside the boy with her first litter.  Her name was Sekhmet.  The night felt cold to the child who was used to coastal temperatures and thicker clothing, but he’d lost his jacket when that first soldier had tried to take him.  He teared up at the memory.  Why did grown-ups have to do such awful things for no reason?

No reason he could find, anyway.  Leon knew the reason, but nine or even ten seemed much too young for the child to grasp the depth of the situation, or his reasons for doing what he now did.  He had decided to write it down and now held the letter sealed in waterproof plastic and stowed in his bag.  His thoughts also dwelled on the memory of the day the soldier had tried to take his son, although he recalled the time for a different reason.  The NCR would pay for such actions.  He would carve a haven in the world where his son could live safely and he no longer cared if it took his life even to try.  

Shivering in his thin red shirt, which had become threadbare and torn in the past few weeks, Elipidos moved to cling to his father’s leg, eyeing the man lying still on Leon’s other side.  The boy knew nothing of the Legion and nor did he even recognize the face from the newspapers or propaganda.  He saw only a man who seemed as inexplicably harried by the soldiers as his own family, although something about the stranger unsettled him even more than all strangers did of late.  

Leon had refused to sit down for most of the past week and although it disturbed his son, the boy had not asked.  He did not know that his father stayed standing in the hope of keeping his mind alert and tense enough that he would not dwell on the recent past.  It did not often work, but so far it had succeeded in hiding his pain.  He would reach Vegas, he told himself, if only by virtue of his willpower.  

For the past several days, they had stopped only briefly and Leon had often carried his sleeping son so they could make better time.  With both parents easily capable of carrying their offspring, he and Sekhmet traversed incredible distances before the NCR could track them down.  It did not help their enemies that Leon’s boots had been modified to disguise his footprints as best as possible and no one was likely to recognize the unusual paws of Sekhmet, the first of her kind.  Leon supposed such were the perks of being a highly skilled geneticist and engineer.  Or perhaps merely the perks of being exceptionally clever.  

Even so, he knew that the NCR would find him eventually and he hoped to reach a group which could shelter his son before his luck and limbs gave out.  He would have pressed on through the night, only butchering the soldiers as he passed if the injured man had not evoked, by sheer coincidence, a painful memory.  Leon stared down at him now as Elipidos fell asleep against his ankle and Sekhmet curled her mighty body beside him, letting her joeys emerge and investigate the area.  In the paler light the unconscious stranger’s hair looked darker, less brown and more black, and his eyes were now closed, but his face still reminded Leon of his murdered spouse.  A similar kind of face, although it lacked the deep coppery tone his lost love had exhibited.  But this man’s eyes had looked blue, bright, pale blue, as his lover’s had been, although Elipidos had developed a dark brown shade like Leon’s father’s in the eye that was not as lavender as Leon’s own right eye.  The stranger’s dark hair had even appeared to be the dead man’s lovely shade of deep chestnut brown in the firelight.  Leon had first met his husband when he saved the man from thugs after finding him beaten to the ground in a similar position.  

Sleep deprived, slightly starved, and uncomfortable for more reasons than one, Leon still saw the rescue as a questionable decision.  He knew he could not trust such deja vu in place of good judgement, not when his son’s safety depended on it, but neither could his troublesome emotions allow him to leave the helpless stranger to die.  He had already strapped a few stimpaks to the man’s limbs, bound his ribs, and bandaged his wounds before hauling the stranger from the camp.  The injured man had been bleeding internally in many places, but hopefully the stims would take care of that.  Leon had managed to mostly clear the stranger’s lungs.  

Carrying him had only been difficult for fear of further harming him; nearly eight feet tall, Leon dwarfed the much thinner stranger as he had dwarfed his dead husband.  His nine-year-old son only reached his thigh when they stood beside each other.  Like Leon himself had, he suspected that the boy would remain short until puberty and then grow like an oak.  This annoyingly reminiscent man stood fully grown at what Leon estimated to be just under five and a half feet, but well-proportioned at that size.  

Even so, the stranger looked plenty large to overpower Elipidos, so Leon fought his biology yet again and stayed standing, keeping watch through the night.  He had confidence that the hollow in the desert rocks was fairly hidden and they would not be found by large groups of soldiers, who would likely focus more on the burning camp, while animals and raiders would either flee from Sekhmet or from a sleeping man in power armor with a gatling laser and a pet they had never seen before.  Thus the only threat he needed to worry about was the man he had saved.  Leon moved his laser closer, so that he could reach it and the man could not, and locked the joints of his power armor.  He allowed himself to relax while keeping his silent vigil.  

*       *       *

The light of dawn teased my mind from slumber.  Agony told me that the previous night had not been a dream.  Every breath cracked scabs and shifted broken bones and badly bruised flesh.  My head pounded with every heartbeat, the sound felt like knives in my brain.  I heard nothing else.  Slowly, I noticed the thick and solid feeling of my ears.  Blood had filled and dried inside of them, if they had not simply swollen shut.  I knew next to nothing about the anatomy of such things.  Was I even capable of hearing any more?  Fear sank into my gut like venom.  My eyes were closed.  If I could not hear, I had no way of sensing a threat.  

My eyes snapped open.  A crescent of boulders sheltered the place where I lay, hiding the area between the jagged stones and the dusty cliff to the Northwest.  The natural barrier blocked the brightest rays of sunlight and cast the sheltered patch in shadow.  I lay on the ground, my wounds bandaged, my chest bound, and my body much too sore to move.  I tried.  My fingers lifted from the ground spasmodically but my arm lay perfectly still, the muscles too bruised and battered to answer my brain’s command.  I saw a needle strapped to that shoulder near my face.  For one fleeting second, I thought it was some sort of paralytic, but then I recognized the profligate medicine.  I wore a Legion uniform.  Even if my canine hood had been lost, my allegiance remained clear.  But then, I considered, the man who had killed those soldiers was surely no friend of the NCR.  Perhaps he was Legion as well?  Perhaps I had misjudged his size through my haze of pain and...relief.  Yes, relief.  Why?  I swore that I did not fear death and I refused to believe that it had been such a fear which had driven my wishes to be free yesterday.  Relief that the soldiers would not further impede Legion actions.  Yes.  That had to be it.  

The ground here was soft, a mix of sand and silt from the dusty hillside, but it still made my body ache where bones and bruises pressed into the soil beneath my weight.  Even without direct sunlight, my eyes burned and every breath strained a battered ribcage.  I lay very still, just willing the pain to ebb enough that I could ensure that this place was safe to rest, and, if I was lucky, recover enough to report back.  The stabbing pain of deep breaths drove me to inhale more slowly and draw the air through my nose.  

The action also meant that I unexpectedly learned more of my current situation through smell.  The air still held a hint of smoke, but so little that I knew only smoldering embers remained of the bonfire my camp had become.  I had only brought five men with me as the mission had required stealth and we had not expected a need for manpower.  Thirty NCR soldiers of pitifully minimal experience had slaughtered all but two soldiers and myself before the three of us could retaliate.  Considering the numbers involved, I felt mildly impressed that we had even managed so many kills before the remaining ten soldiers had overpowered me and slain my men.  

I noticed also, amid the dispersing smoke, a faint animal musk.  Breath, I supposed, possibly dog-breath.  The animal was nearby but not so close for the scent to be too unpleasant.  I could smell at least one human as well.  The hard life of the wasteland did not often allow access to clean water.  Personally, I held myself to high standards and found it much easier to sneak up on those I wished to kill when clean, but I understood very well that circumstances often did not allow such cleanliness.  I had smelled much worse as far as profligates went.  If he was a profligate.  If he was Legion, I had not heard of him and could not remember the armor I had seen clearly enough to determine allegiance based on his attire.  Surely the vague memory I had had been a hallucination.  

Where I lay, I could not see him, only rocks and sky.  My bruised and swollen neck refused to turn, much to my annoyance.  I waited, still unable to hear and uncomfortably aware of how very vulnerable that left me.  

A cold, damp something nudged my hand, sending an agonizing shiver up my spine.  A warm swipe followed the cold, equally wet.  I strained to see.  My neck still refused.  A low and furry brown spine moved to the edge of my vision.  An animal of some kind.  The dog, no doubt, and a friendly one, it seemed.  I relaxed.  I could do nothing to stop the animal and it posed no threat.  At least not at the moment.  

More fur brushed my knee and I sensed another pup moving along my other side, followed by a third.  Something tugged at my boot and a paw brushed my sock.  Four dogs.  Each no larger than a small radroach.  Four pups.  The mother may be more aggressive.  I strained my fingers to feel my belt for my ripper.  It was gone.  Damn.  Unable to move, I could do nothing if the animals chose to attack and that unnerved me.  

A face loomed before me.  Perhaps I had been wrong.  The animal had large eyes and striking markings.  A canine head, almost disproportionate to the small body, stared down at me from wide, brightly golden eyes.  Triangles of black fur framed those eyes, surrounded by larger pale triangles and beyond that the short fur gleamed a gold-tinted tan.  Short black whiskers bristled from the animal’s muzzle beneath a large, round, black nose.  The pup’s ears concerned me more than the strange markings or even the fluff of slightly longer hair around the animal’s neck.  Both were comically large and round, round as I had only seen on yaoi-gaui.  I had never seen the cubs of such a beast; perhaps this was one?  The idea chilled my blood.  The cubs of such a terrible beast would never roam far from the parent.  

But this animal had a collar.  A woven band ringed the creature’s small neck, crafted in a pattern of crimson and violet threads and hung with a small gold tag.  The tag bore a name.  “Atalanta.”  Named for the woman huntress and warrior of ancient Greek legend.  I had heard the story shortly after being recruited, having been told by the man we now called The Burned Man, if we spoke of him at all.  As far as I knew, no one else in the Legion short of Caesar himself had heard the story.  If this was a pet of the man who had saved me, then that man was educated.  Perhaps a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, the most technologically advanced enemy of the NCR that I knew of.  

Atalanta seemed to yawn, opening her mouth far wider than I had ever seen any animal manage before.  Those jaws displayed budding points of teeth, several dozen of them, although only three long fangs had grown in so far.  The pup snapped her jaws shut inaudibly and swiped a long pink tongue across my face.  I could do little more than wince, and I suspect that I made some quiet sound of annoyance, although I heard nothing.  Ignoring my irritation, the animal rested her muzzle gently on my forehead, looking down at me with one large golden eye.  I scowled at her silently.  

I don’t know what alerted me to further movement nearby, but I sensed it.  Someone separated a pup from my boot and two of the others retreated from my sides.  Atalanta raised her head and watched, staying beside me.  A man stepped into my field of vision, the man who had saved my life.  In daylight, I could see him clearly.  I had not misjudged his size.  He rivaled Lanius himself in height and mass.  Beneath a suit of strange and battered power armor scorched and painted black, his body bulged with muscles.  He wore no helmet at the moment, leaving his striking appearance clearly visible  A scar crossed one side of his skull and zagged along his thick and angular brow.  It had left his hair short on that side, although it hung in a crimson curtain on the other, streaked with the white strands of his strange trident marking.  Had I been superstitious, I might have taken this man to be some messenger of the gods, and I knew many legionaries who would have.  A series of odd bulbs and devices channeled arcs of electricity over the exterior of his armor, giving him the appearance of wearing a storm.  I did not see whatever weapon the man had wielded last night, but the cold, almost somber power in those brilliant and pale eyes struck me speechless.  I knew at once that this man could at the very least equal Lanius and if he would join the Legion, he might succeed Caesar and become as mighty and skilled as his predecessor, if not even greater.  I realized also that I desired such an outcome.  Lanius could never lead the Legion, and he would never allow it to be taken from him if Caesar fell.  He would run it into the ground out of his own manic egocentricity.  This man, however, could lead it to the level of greatness that Caesar dreamed of.  

The man above me spoke.  “Can you move?”  I heard nothing but read his lips.  

Speaking took more effort than I had expected.  “Who are you?”

He frowned, apparently having some difficulty understanding me.  He must have realized how little I could move because he stooped stiffly to prop me up against a boulder, running his hands over my broken ribs in a way that made me think he was a doctor.  So he had not just used stimpaks, he had done something more.  

He was bleeding.  Now that I could see him clearly, I wondered how he could still stand.  His power armor was mangled, the flesh beneath so scorched and blackened that I could barely tell where the twisted metal met the wounds.  One even seemed to reach bone, but I could not be certain.  

Sitting up, I could study my surroundings more clearly while the seemingly invincible man examined me and tended to my wounds.  I didn’t bother suggesting that he limit himself to Legion-approved medicine; at this point I was still in such pain that I doubted healing powder and the like could possibly save me.  The choice was profligate medicine or death, and I was no idiot.  

I could see Atalanta clearly now, as well as her siblings and their mother.  Each pup bore slightly different features, making them recognizable beyond the different shades of their collars.  The mother, a truly massive beast the size of a small yaoi-gaui and similar in appearance, wore a thick black leather collar studded with steel spikes and bearing the name “Sekhmet.”  The Egyptian deity of vengeance and war.  I had heard of her; it seemed a proper name for such a fearsome bitch.  In face and facial markings, she resembled her pups, although her fur was slightly darker and her eyes and ears much smaller, proportionally.  A pair of long fangs jutted down over her lower jaw.  Her limbs were strange, as were those of her young.  Their forelimbs resembled those of dogs except for a fifth toe and long, lethally sharp claws on the mother.  The young had budding claws, each only a pale nub rather than a nine-inch steel-gray sickle.  The animals’ hind legs formed long feet and powerful thighs in a way I had never seen before.  Above these mighty legs, the beasts had long and tapering tails as stiff as a reptile’s and bearing a similar ridge of short spines.  This ridge continued to the powerful shoulders where the back met the neck.  Here Sekhmet’s fur became a short, dark mane over the top of her neck and shoulders.  From her chin to the oddly smooth area between her powerful back legs, the bitch was a creamy shade of off-white and her rump, like those of her pups, bore vivid vertical stripes over a patch of lighter tan.  Sekhmet watched me as I puzzled over her strange appearance.  Her pups, aside from Atalanta, gathered beneath her muscular body.  Their genders seemed oddly difficult to spot.  The largest two, I guessed, were male.  One bore a collar of woven navy and indigo with a tag bearing the name “Cato.”  Another good name, I supposed.  Cato was pale, perhaps albino.  His eyes looked almost pink and the scaly ridge along his back seemed less pronounced.  His stripes and other markings faded to silver on his white fur.  He seemed to be one of the boldest of the pups; I suspected that he had been the one to first approach me and he stood watching the entrance to this secluded hollow now, his round ears raised on his skull.  Near Cato, the largest juvenile gnawed his mother’s paw.  A tag on his green and teal collar labeled him Copernicus.  His fur gleamed darker than his mother’s and the ridge of scales extended to a bald and coppery section of his stiff tail.  His snout also seemed longer, more...crocodilian.  The second female, I supposed, a reddish pup more luxuriously furred than the rest, bore the name “Artemis” on a gold and copper collar.  She slept soundly near her mother.  Atalanta seemed the most like the adult in appearance.  Aside from a slightly lighter and more golden coat, the only difference was a tuft of longer hair at the tip of her stiff and elegant tail.  I found the animals fascinating.  

The man examining me injected something into my left ear.  I couldn’t see him, so he had no way of communicating his intention, but I quickly figured it out myself.  A matter of seconds after the stab of the needle, I could feel my ear canal opening up as the swelling went down and hear the dried blood shifting about.  

“You’ll need to have them cleaned out at some point, but I won’t do that now.  Can you hear me?”

I started to nod and winced at the wave of agony that surged through my neck and skull.  “Yes.”  

“Good.  Can you walk?”

I hesitated, trying again to force my body to move.  “No,” I admitted grudgingly.  

“Can you move at all?”

He was checking for paralysis.  I recognized that much.  I had seen men hit in the back left unable to move their legs.  They were typically executed.  At the time, I’d thought I would rather die than be paralyzed.  I wasn’t sure if that opinion remained true, but I hoped that I would not need to find out.  

At least for the moment, I had little choice but to let this gigantic man examine me.  He ran his fingers along the back of my neck, probing the bruises painfully.  “There’s swelling somewhere pressing on the nerves, whether or not you’ll recover will depend on where it is.”  He stabbed another stimpak into my arm and strapped it on.  

He had ignored my question before, so I asked again, more firmly.  “Who are you?”  I was more interested in learning his allegiance than his name, but he only told the latter.  

“Charon.”

The Greek ferryman of the dead?  It had to be some kind of alias.  

Charon stood up as if he had heard something.  He frowned towards the road and jammed the helmet of his power armor back on his head, not quite connecting properly from what little I knew about the rare devices.  

“Elipidos!”

Nearby a boy scrambled to his feet.  He looked about ten years old, the age of Legion trainees, and he wore a tattered red shirt and black shorts, so I almost mistook him for one.  His auburn hair had a patch of white above a vaguely round white spot on his forehead; even if one of his eyes had not been the same strange shade of lavender as his father’s, I would have guessed their relationship.  

Charon stepped towards the opening of the sheltered little area in which we had all spent the night with the boy close behind him.  I fully expected him to leave, in which case I would likely die here in the heat of the day, but then he paused.  Without looking back, he queried, “Is anyone you know likely to come back here looking for you?”

“No.”

For a long moment he stood there, presumably debating his course of action, then he turned and approached me.  Without a word, the enormous man wrapped an arm around my chest and slung me over his shoulder, awkwardly draped between flashing bulbs and plates of steel.  He moved me as if I weighed nothing at all, and I could not tell if this was due to the armor or if it was his own strength.  The armor seemed heavily damaged.  I did not expect it to be functional.  Under normal circumstances, I would have been indignant if not outraged, but I was too weak now to protest, and without this man’s aid, I would surely die.  As it was, I marveled at him.  I owed my life to this man, who rivaled Lanius in size and almost surely in strength, this man who had wiped out even a small NCR camp more quickly than I had thought possible.  And now, for no reason I could imagine, this stranger chose to go out of his way to save my life.  This was the sort of man the Legion needed to ensure its greatness after Caesar was gone.  

The man who had introduced himself as Charon carried me across the wasteland, child and strange pets in tow.  He moved as I imagined locomotives once had, a constant, uneven pace as he persisted across the rocks and the dust and the sand, slogging up and down, oblivious to the changes in slope and terrain.  He walked in a straight line, saying nothing, crushing what rare vegetation stood in his way as if he didn’t even see it.  Perhaps that description was accurate.  The helmet was dented and bloodstained; perhaps it obscured his vision.  Or perhaps he simply did not care to see.  

Around noon we stopped.  I guess the swelling that had paralyzed me had gone down at some point because I realized that I could move more now, though my few attempts to walk quickly revealed that I was still too weak to balance.  The man had food and water with him; the water in an irregular array of bottles and the food mostly rations clearly scavenged from NCR soldiers.  He had at least three dozen of the rations, more than he could possibly have found on the men that had ambushed my group last night.  “You are an enemy of the NCR?  Are you a member of the Brotherhood of Steel?”  He offered the food and drink to both myself and his son and I helped myself.   It was pointless to distrust him; the man had gone to great lengths to keep me alive, there was no reason for him to poison me.  

I expected him to eat as well, but he did not, nor did he even remove his helmet to drink.  But he did answer my question.  “I am an enemy of the Brotherhood as well.  But they have become pathetic.  The NCR has beaten them down; they are not a threat anymore.”  

“Why are they your enemies?”  If he could be made to ally with the Legion...

The man tilted his head at me, seeming to cast a suspicious stare my way.  “Call it an accident of birth.  Like so many things.”  He made a sound that could have been a laugh of a cough and I suspected the latter.  

The dog-like animal named Sekhmet slunk over to eat some of the rations and the child tended to it and the pups, which emerged from a pouch I hadn’t seen between her back legs.  

Charon apparently noticed my curious observation of his pet.  “I made their species from DNA of several different animals.  I call them `marsupial hounds.’”  I frowned, recognizing only the greek roots of the word.  “Bag dogs”?  Perhaps due to the pouch?

Charon did not rest for long.  We were on the road again in after barely ten minutes.  He recognized that I could move, although he knew I could not walk on my own, but now his son was struggling to keep pace with his gigantic strides.  The boy was strong, presumably he took after his father, but I had seen many children die on forced marches at this pace.  I was not surprised when Charon hefted Elipidos onto his shoulders, but I had not expected him to still wrap an arm around my chest to carry me as well.  Now a part of me felt that the power armor must be functioning; no normal man could carry us both so easily...although this man had already proven to be far from ordinary.  Hauling both my pitifully weakened body and his son, Charon’s pace increased to a shaky lope.  He moved as if about to drop, but channeled his momentum into another step each time.  The result was an alarmingly jolting charge that had me struggling to keep myself relatively steady against his battered power armor.  


End file.
